Weltall

We know the names and locations (more or less) of ten Shards and know a tiny bit about one or two others but only in terms of vague hints.

I doubt he was trying to test whether Jasnah was a Radiant because to confirm that you'd need to see her Soulcast without the fabrial or do something outside the normal parameters of the thing. So far as we can tell, there's nothing in that scene that doesn't fit how fabrial Soulcasting is 'supposed' to work. Jasnah uses the thing to disguise her talent so she's presumably avoiding any suspicious uses outside of extreme circumstances. Granted, we don't know enough about the mechanics of fabrial soulcasting to be certain (Oathbringer is supposed to have an interlude from an ardent soulcaster so we'll see what we learn there) but it doesn't seem likely he was testing her. The Diagram has other points it tells its followers to look for in determining proto-Radiants. And yeah, Taravangian's own Soulcaster might not have been on-hand.and even if he was it couldn't be used without potentially arousing suspicion because Kharbranth isn't supposed to have any of the things. He was also in one of his less-intelligent days, meaning he was more compassionate. It's entirely possible that he simply used a resource he had on hand without an ulterior motive, though keeping Jasnah in the city and getting a sense for what she was researching could certainly have been a nice side benefit.

@Extesian Liar of Partinel is explicity called out in the site rules as okay to discuss, with the suggestion to keep it in Cosmere Theories.

I suspect Brandon was thinking of regular Breath in terms of being kind of like Hemalurgy, as those involve a bit of Investiture grafted onto your spiritweb and they can be transferred from person to person. Divine Breaths are a bit more complicated than the normal type since their primary purpose is to (somewhat imperfectly) staple your spiritweb back into your body. When it's passed on via the usual Command it seems to 'stick' in the same way that normal Breath sticks to a Lifeless and it grants a 'miracle' healing but the recipient doesn't get any of the other benefits the Returned did vis a vis free Heightenings. All that said, the unique way Divine Breaths interact with the Returned might actually make such an Awakening more of a possibility, if there's some way for your spiritweb to 'imprint' upon it over time or with some specific visualization a la whatever Vasher does to hide his Divine Breath. If such an Awakening is possible, it would definitely be a crazy Command and of course you'd only get one shot at trying it...

He didn't say specifically so the following is just a guess off the top of my head. Assuming that slatrification works in a similar manner to Soulcasting from Stormlight Archive, you have to essentially bribe the Cognitive aspect of the material to transform into something else by giving it some form of Investiture and commanding it to change and how successful you are depends on force of personality, any inherent resistance in the target and how much Investiture you're funneling into it. With Taldain's setup, the sand is already Invested so the user isn't really able to offer it anything and its Invested nature makes it somewhat more resistant to change anyways. So it's a bit weird in that respect and it's also very different from the main aspect of Sand Mastery, which is telekinesis. Also, the very idea of slatrification acts as a 'cheat' around the primary limitation of the magic system (violating Sanderson's Second Law) that it uses your body's water reserves as a catalyst. That makes for an overpowered combination that's built into the system as it exists. Brandon has done similar things in other settings but it's always been much more limited, whereas slatrification is widespread at least among the highest-ranked members of the diem.

Well Brandon did say that he used Hawaii as a model for the ecosystem of Hallandren (and how utterly grueling that research was ) so he might have had some of their flowers in mind specifically. But lotus flowers or orchids would be a really good option as well given their real-world religious significance.

The Church of the Survivor naturally has as part of its doctrine that Kelsier is still around but it's more an article of faith than actual knowledge. Given that Brandon told us in WoBs prior to Bands of Mourning (and we could deduce it from the events of The Hero of Ages itself) that Kelsier had been looking after the power of Preservation before Vin took it up, it's likely the church preaches that as well. There might even be something in the text to that effect. I'm pretty certain that they don't actually know that Kelsier survived after passing the power to Vin or that he's still around (and with a new body) in the present era. Generally speaking, the rules require spoiler tags for material in a series-specific board that involves content from another series (say, if you're discussing material from Elantris as part of a topic in the Mistborn boards) as well as for works that have their own separate spoiler boards; this because the top-level view doesn't distinguish so you want to warn people who haven't read the latest work from clicking 'most recent topic' and getting surprised. Anything beyond that is pretty much up to your own feelings.

@Oversleep I wonder what the atium-to-Breaths exchange rate is on the Worldhopper Mercantile Index?

Given that we aren't mind-readers and can't tell who you may have overlooked, might as well just list all the known worldhoppers. Edit: Whoops, good call @Jondesu

Silver, he finally found a place it fits in the Metallic Arts.

Bodies sublimate upon ascension so in the Physical sense there isn't a body to spike. They only reappear when the Vessel dies or gives up the Shard. Brandon has confirmed that there's a time window in which you can spike a corpse and get something out of it Hemalurgically. We don't know what needs to be done to steal powers not native to Scadrial but since atium is able to steal every possible power/attribute that we know of, it's likely that it could steal non-Scadrian powers on its own. There may be a more recent WoB I'm not aware of but I know he's RAFO'd questions about the mechanics of stealing other powers. I'm pretty sure that you physically can't spike Nightblood in the first place and it 'corrupts' the Investiture it consumes (we know he doesn't care about the form the Investiture takes, it's all fuel to him) so you probably wouldn't get anything useful out, or you'd have to find some sort of hack to make it useful. As for stealing Breath with Hemalurgy normally, I don't think we know but it seems redundant since anyone can be gifted Breath and getting it automatically rewires your spiritweb to allow you to Awaken so it's not really a power you need to steal. Given that Hoid can apparently heal damage to his soul perfectly (to the point that he doesn't think a Shardblade would affect him) I suspect he could heal back any spiritweb damage a spike might do to him. And his spiritweb is probably so crazy that I suspect he's effectively immune to getting spiked. But we don't know for certain. We do have a WoB that Hoid doesn't use Hemalurgy for any of his own powers and would prefer not to open himself up to Shardic influence so he seems capable of using spikes at least, he just doesn't want to..

I think WoR just got the altered ending, I don't remember hearing anything about new artwork.

Yah, we know (or technically, very strongly assume) that Shallash is The Mistress, the woman going around destroying artwork with a noteable emphasis on, well, herself. We see another example of this in Lift's interlude where yet another depiction of a certain Herald in yet another royal residence has been defaced.

Working now, but clearly this was all part of a fiendish plot to disguise the fact that Brandon 'accidentally' shared all his notes for future books for a minute to see if anyone was paying attention, then took the site down to clean them out. <Hides copy of the downloaded text revealing that Lopen is actually Adonalsium Reborn>

Ishar is also the one who told the other Heralds that the Oathpact would probably still hold with just Taln stuck in Damnation so if there's more going on than just his particular flavor of insanity then it's potentially been going on for a long time. Which isn't helped by the one epigraph from the Diagram 'One is almost certainly a traitor to the others'. It's part of the same collection of text that talks about the Unmade but there's a gap of about ten paragraphs between those entries and the one about a traitor so it's possible the topic changed somewhere in between those paragraphs from the Unmade to the Heralds. Either way, there's definitely lots of material seeded here for whenever Ishar finally appears in person.

Killing ~90% of the global population while also wrecking all the infrastructure will generally not do good things to the level of civilization. We know that in at least one Desolation, there seems to have been an active attempt to kill nearly everyone who could write (Dalinar's flashback of the guy he/we assume to be Nohadon appears to have left Kholinar with a single one-armed man who possessed that skill) so if we assume that Odium has some standing instructions for his forces to destroy knowledge and the people best able to remember it and transmit it to future generations, that will add to the devastation.

Yeah, Brandon just mentioned at the signing in Poland that a rewriting of the prose version is still a possibility (in the context of that being an opportunity to remove a troublesome element that made it into the graphic novel) and before that he mentioned that plans for the as-yet-unwritten sequels to White Sand are up in the air as far as their format goes, depending on the overall reception of the graphic novels. So Taldain's story might be all-graphic novel or it might be a hybrid of some sort. Though if you want to really get into hair-splitting territory we have material about Taldain that's not in graphic novel form (Khriss' essay in Arcanum Unbounded) so... technically not everything in that system is in GN format already.

@Landis963 Actually, Brandon has mentioned that he did know the joke before putting it in and realized that since it worked Realmatically he couldn't pass up the opportunity to throw it in.

@joesleepsalot Edgedancer spoiler And yeah, I'm assuming that 'Taln' almost certainly is Taln and Brandon is being evasive because there's something specific he doesn't want to reveal yet. Kind of like how there's no particular reason to think that Renarin isn't a Truthwatcher other than Brandon not explicitly confirming it. Unless you count the pocket companion which... actually did if you take it at face value. xD

The exact wording in that quote makes me wonder. Brandon says that you could technically use light from Taldain's star to power a solar sail but that's not necessarily using Investiture, it's just how solar sails work. In other words, he may have been giving us an Aes Sedai Non-Answer in order to avoid revealing anything potentially important that he's not ready to. I thought Tanavast's line might have implied that as well but as was pointed out to me, he says it in a context where he's talking about what Vorinism teaches about The Almighty, he's not directly claiming to have created human life on the planet.

As Oversleep revealed to us, Brandon has been studying Lightsong's methods and has started engaging in trolling-by-proxy so I wouldn't put it past him. xD

Yeah, it's by no means the only possible explanation but it's the most common theory and for all intents and purposes the most plausible given what we know.

From the illustration it looks like the sufficiently old chulls essentially become immoble and live out their last days (months? years?) like that. This kind of life cycle can be observed in species on Earth (typically in coastal environments) though not with anything as complex as the crablike chulls. Sponges for example have a larval stage that can swim freely, then they attach themselves and become sessile. Presumably there's some benefit to this for the chulls but I'm not sure we can guess what it is yet. It's also mentioned that whitespines have a hibernation state where they cocoon themselves and there was that much smaller critter Tien found in Way of Kings so there might be a relation there too. As someone who loves marine biology I too am looking forward to every new bit of info we get on Roshar's ecology.

@Yitzi2 Pssst, bumping a thread that's almost a year old is generally frowned upon.

@Oversleep But does that mean the cosmere will end and cease to exist at some point? Is it good that it should end? Does he instead mean that the stories will end but the cosmere will go on? And if so, is the ending 'good'? And what is 'good', why not 'awesome'? So much hinges on his ambiguity!